The Ecosystem of openKONSEQUENZ, A User-Led Open Source Foundation

Companies without expertise in software development can opt to form consortia to develop open source software to meet their needs, as an alternative to the build-or-buy decision. Such user-led foundations are little understood, due to a limited number of published examples. In particular, almost nothing is known about the ecosystems surrounding user-led foundations. Our work seeks to address this gap, through an exploratory qualitative survey of openKONSEQUENZ, from the German energy sector. We find that the technological goals are quite homogeneous, independent of a participant’s role in the ecosystem, but that economic conflicts exist between foundation members and supplier companies due to the consortium’s efforts to transform the software market structure to limit dependency on specific vendors. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this chapter (10.1007/978-3-030-47240-5_1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.